Departmental Honors Projects

This project analyzes the literary works and the iconic role of Filipino nationalist José Rizal before, during, and after the Spanish American War of 1898. Rizal’s social activism and writing inspired a revolution against the Friarocracy in the Philippines. He also influenced Filipino American writers who reference Rizal’s construction of the Filipino woman in Christianity and Filipinos fighting against colonial oppression. Additionally, Filipino American writers illustrate how being Filipino in the US today is a transcultural experience rather than a simple binary of traditional Philippines and modern America. Recognizing Spain as an earlier colonizing force is critical in ...

The Barbarian's Beverage: A History Of Beer In Ancient Europe, Max Nelson

Languages, Literatures and Cultures Publications

This book is an attempt at analyzing all surviving evidence for beer in ancient Europe, whether literary or material, from the beginnings to about A.D. 1000. While in general in those places where cereal was grown beer was also produced, this was not

Staff publications, research, and presentations

Tigrinya is a Semitic language spoken in Eritrea and in the Tigray Region of Northern Ethiopia. Tigrinya is one of the nine languages in Eritrea. It was one of Eritrea's official languages (along with Arabic) during the short-lived federation with Ethiopia (1952-1962). When Ethiopia officially annexed Eritrea in 1962, Amharic also formally replaced Tigrinya and Arabic; and was established as an official language by the imperial government of Ethiopia. In 1993, when Eritrea officially declared its independence through referendum. Tigrinya regained its status as a working language.

A Linguistic Comparison: Stress-Timed And Syllable-Timed Languages And Their Impact On Second Language Acquisition, Madeline M. Conlen

Honors College Theses

Acquisition of a second language can be a challenging task because no two languages are alike in their structure, syllabification, pronunciation, rhythm, etc. Also, after speaking one language for any amount of time, the speaker becomes accustomed to the specific qualities of that language; therefore, learning to speak another language takes extra effort because it is essentially rewiring the brain to think differently in many ways. One important element of language is prosody, or the patterns of stress and intonation in language (Dilley et al 237). The subsector of prosody that is to be studied is rhythm, explicitly isochrony and ...

This work, which parts from the premise that music is a medium of communication with the potential to transform and create identities, explores rock music in Nicaragua since its beginning until the present. Nicaraguan rock music is born in a sociopolitical context of extreme economic instability and during a crisis of values in the last decade of the 20th century, with the end of the Sandinista Revolution and the establishment of neoliberal government. The young cultural movement, and rock in particular, constructs a discourse dissident from the patriarchal and capitalist hegemony and interrogates the social reality ...

All Articles in Modern Languages

Kinesthetic Language: A Dialect Of Kinesics, Terrill Suzanne Corletto

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

Human communication requires the disciplines regarding physical fitness, codified language, and the performing arts to overlap, and exist symbiotically. Within the realm of artistic performance, the three disciplines working together deliver a deliberate message in a way unique to performing artists. The general tendency to compartmentalize sports, communication, and the performing arts into their pigeonhole categories of Kinesiology, Linguistics, and Theatre Arts is impractical, particularly for performing artists simply because all of the disciplines are mutually dependent in the context of all kinesthetic communications.

The purpose of this paper is to define and discuss several concepts and the ways in ...

Afro-Americano: The Transracialization Of The African-American Spanish Speaker, John M. Flanagan

All Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Transracialization is not a biological term connoting the change of one’s skin tone to become a member of a different race. Its definition has its roots in racialization—the ideological process that describes how one assembles ideas about groups based on their race and decides, for example, what a ‘Black’ person is and how ‘Black’ people speak. Thus, transracialization is a linguistic term that describes the political and sociocultural act of recontextualizing one’s phenotype with the use of language, and in so doing, upending the observers’ stereotypical expectations of who one is (Alim 2016). This dissertation deals with ...

Honors Theses

Les Gilets Jaunes, or the yellow vests, is a movement of protestors that have had a large presence in France since 2018. Beginning as an online petition against French President Emmanuel Macron’s fuel tax hike, the movement has quickly amassed several hundred thousand protestors in Paris and other cities across the country. It is the objective of this thesis to examine potential reasons why 300,000 people have felt the need to protest throughout France, apart from the now rescinded fuel tax.

To this end, a sample of data from the Varieties of Democracy database was selected. These variables ...

I See What You're Saying: A Deaf Culture And American Sign Language Awareness Event, Alexis M. Sejnoha

Honors Thesis

Deaf Culture and American Sign Language are an important part of the Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing community. Most people outside of this community are unaware of these aspects, and remain uneducated about them. This document is an event plan for an educational event about American Sign Language and Deaf Culture, as well as an artist statement explaining the conception and implementation of this plan, and how it was impacted by the Covid 19 pandemic.

Is Tuition Free College The Golden Ticket? A Time Series Analysis Of Germany’S Higher Education Policy, 1990-2017, Hannah Wolfram

Business and Economics Honors Papers

Countries which have been able to offer free tertiary education are being applauded while the United States tries to find a way to rectify its high tertiary education costs. Germany has accomplished a system of subsidized higher education since the 1950s, making it seem highly successful. In order to investigate the potential benefits of subsidized higher education, this study uses a time series regression analysis to investigate the relationship between tertiary unemployment rate and public spending as a share of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in Germany over the period 1990-2017. The regression analysis corrected for multi-collinearity and serial correlation ...

SIUE Faculty Research, Scholarship, and Creative Activity

The Greater St. Louis “dialect island” poses interesting problems for dialect documentation, partly because Greater St. Louis is a transitional area where many overlapping linguistic influences have left their mark, and also because is an area with new immigrant communities, racial divides, and an aging population.Using a sample from survey and interview data from 815 participants over a seven-year period, we examine lexical diversity in Greater St. Louis, comprising counties both in Missouri and Illinois. We discover that both age and place are robust indicators of lexical selection in Southern Illinois and St. Louis. Our findings provide a concurring ...

In The Cathedral Of The Devil: Young Witches Of Navarre, 1608-1614, Olivia Louise Vande Woude

Undergraduate Honors Theses

A witch-hunt in Spain's northern kingdom of Navarre that occurred between 1608 and 1612, and which was overseen by the Spanish Inquisition, was one of the most famous witch persecutions in European history. In the early nineteenth century, Napoleon's troops burned down the inquisition tribunal that handled this witch persecution, and modern scholars consequently believed that the witches' voices were lost to history. Those scholars did not realize that a number of the witches' statements survived Napoleon and are currently held in Madrid's National Historical Archive. The witches' declarations were made not only by adult men and ...

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This work is composed of three major parts: Part 1 will focus on how cultural production is an arena for power negotiation, the politics of rap as a medium, the rise of the Turkish German rap tradition, a history of policing culture in Germany, and how what is subversive and what is ideal give contour to the euromasculine paradigm. Part 2 will look at how historical orientalism and beliefs about men of color influenced German law, ideas of miscegenation, sexuality and protection of White women from the threat of Brown men, the history and impacts of Turkish migration to Germany ...

Afro-Brazilian Music And Culture, Regina Castro Mcgowan

Open Educational Resources

In this course students will learn about the musical heritage Africans brought to Brazil and how through forced conversion and cultural adaptation, their traditions quickly syncretized into distinct Afro-Brazilian artistic expressions. This course will explore many musical traditions, including; Samba, Pagode, Baile Funk, Candomblé and Axé music for their social, religious and/or political significance, from the early twentieth century through today. In doing so, students will get to practice and learn the vocabulary and grammatical structures found in the music of these rich and varied genres, and acquire a familiarity with conversational Portuguese.

French Club, Brett Foster, Madisen Bell

Honors Expanded Learning Clubs

Afterschool club that introduces French Language and Culture to young elementary students. Through hands-on activities and discussions, students will learn the basics of French Language and complete a French Journal full of everything they learned that semester to take home.

Publications and Research

The overall purpose of this analysis was to exemplify the parallels between the governmental responses to the Tlatelolco Massacre of 1968 and the COVID-19 Pandemic of 2020. “Memorial de Tlatelolco” is a poem that was written by Mexican poet and activist, Rosario Castellanos in 1968 following the Tlatelolco Massacre. The findings of this research note the familiarity instilled in those suffering through the COVID-19 Pandemic by Castellanos' poem.

Undergraduate Honors Theses

The Sun Sets on Chinchontepec is a collection of poetry and prose written in the style of a "fictional memoir." This project explores a mosaic of Salvadoran memory by spanning different narrators, intimacies, motivations, and histories to imagine makeshift recollections of Salvadoran experiences and timelines. The collection moves through images of chaos, the mundane, and the supernatural alike, re-told or imagined, to develop a metaphysical relationship with the landscape that the author observes. A bilingual text, this collection also navigates the power and instability of language, separation, and communion. This project struggles to interpret and memorialize all that has been ...

Useful And Effective Worksheets To Enhance Communicative And Reading Skills For Japanese Language Learners, Masako Nunn

Q2S Enhancing Pedagogy

The purpose of this project is to create useful and effective worksheets to accord with the current textbook (Genki I, published by the Japan Times) in the aim of enhancing Japanese language learners’ communicative and reading skills. Therefore, this project includes the following worksheets in learning Japanese language in accord with the current textbook, Genki I (2nd edition) to enhance communicative and reading practice. This package includes the following: 1) worksheet; 2) worksheet answers; 3) vocabulary worksheet; 4) three PowerPoints with voice recorded; 5) reading supplement- PowerPoint with vocabulary and sentence practice; 6) reading supplement with auditory aid; 7 ...

Writing and Language Studies Faculty Publications and Presentations

Leading an engaged teaching-learning process involves considering a bidirectional transfer of knowledge between teachers and students, since it is about favoring an educational interaction environment where students are not only limited to participate in a traditional way, but expect to find meaning to their learning experience and be able to build the acquired knowledge. It’s a dialectical unit between either instruction and education or teaching and learning that would allow to identify a stage of reflection and critical thinking toward the new educational models. In other words, a field where teachers are asked to transform their role as exhibitors ...

Interpreting And Dyslexia, How To Cope, Elaina Snow

Master's of Arts in Interpreting Studies (MAIS) Action Research

This action research project is about how Dyslexia influences the physical and cognitive aspects of the interpreting process. Dyslexia is a spectrum and does not influence everyone to the same degree. Therefore, this study will be limited to testing several strategies provided by a variety of interpreters on only one participant, myself, who has Dyslexia. I applied a variety of coping strategies for different cognitive and physical aspects of Dyslexia to my interpreting work. Next, I found a common theme between interpreters that have Dyslexia. Once I figured out a common theme, I picked a few strategies to test and ...

Etymologies Of Chinese Hànzì And Japanese Kanji: Explanations On Liùshū 六書 And Rikusho 六書, William P.M. Funk

Chinese Language Teaching Methodology and Technology

This paper outlines Liùshū六書 interpretations of Chinese character etymology to help co-create a better approach for educators in supporting character literacy development in students of the East Asian languages that utilize Chinese writing. The Liùshū 六書 Rikusho六書approach to character instruction can be interpreted as a strategy to spark interest in western learners providing more detailed explanations that deal with the pictographic and compound nature of Chinese character formation. All non-English words are italicized or bolded, Chinese based terms are in Mandarin Pīnyīn 拼音, and Japanese terms are written in Romaji ローマ字 representing their differences phonetically to integrate foreign ...

A Comparative Study Of The Chinese Characters In The Graded List And The Ebcl List, Qi Zhang, George Xinsheng Zhang, Yuanhui Gao

Chinese Language Teaching Methodology and Technology

This study scrutinizes the Chinese characters in two reference works compiled as part of two projects: the Graded list and the EBCL list. Situated in the character-based theory, the characters compiled in both are examined in depth from the perspective of character complexity, character structure, semantic and phonetic radical transparency, frequency of character and frequency of word formation. The results show that the two lists share similarities in terms of distribution of characters of different structures, level of semantic radical transparency, and frequencies of character and word formation. The character complexity of the Graded list is higher than that of ...